What a marketing data audit actually checks

Audit first, always. Not because it's due diligence, but because proposing a build before you know what already exists means guessing at the size of the problem. Most marketing data audits amount to a quick look at Google Analytics and a shrug. A real one checks four specific things, in order, and the fourth is the one nobody else bothers with.

Ad accounts

Meta, Google, LinkedIn and Bing each report differently and lie to you differently. The audit isn't "are the accounts running" — it's what each one is counting, how it's counting it, and where the conversions overlap. A seven-day click and one-day view window on one platform and a thirty-day window on another means the same customer can get claimed by both, and neither number is wrong by its own definition. That's the part worth writing down before anyone touches a budget.

Tracking

Tag Manager and GA4 next: what fires, what's broken, and what's been quietly broken for months without anyone noticing, because a broken tag doesn't throw an error — it just stops reporting, and a dashboard with a gap in it looks the same as a dashboard with nothing happening. Most accounts we've looked into have at least one tag in this state.

CRM

The part almost nobody checks, and the part that matters most: whether a lead can be traced back to its source at all, and whether closed revenue can be traced back to the campaign that produced it. A CRM with no consistent source field is a CRM that can't settle an argument between two ad platforms, which is most of what it's for.

The gap between them

Once the first three are mapped, the audit measures where they disagree, by how much, and which one is closer to true. This is usually where the real finding sits — not in any single source being wrong, but in the size of the overlap between sources that are each individually defensible. (We've written more on why that overlap exists and what fixing it involves.)

What you get back

A written findings document, not a call: what's tracked, what's broken, what's missing, and what each of those is costing you in decisions. Your ad platform numbers set against your CRM numbers, with the gap quantified. And a build plan — what we'd fix, in what order, and what it would take — that's yours to take elsewhere. No obligation to continue, and no pitch dressed up as a report.